Dr. Hilary Cass is an award-winning British medical doctor who previously served as president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health. Esteemed in her field, politically innocuous, and a recipient of the Order of the British Empire, National Health Services England evidently figured Cass was the ideal candidate to lead an independent investigation into the U.K.’s sex-change regime and its youth-facing services.
Cass obliged them and started work on the review in 2020. Her landmark report — the product of roughly four years of penetrating investigation and analysis — came out earlier this month, transitioning public opinion and effectively putting a nail in the coffin of LGBT activists’ narrative about so-called gender-affirming care.
The
388-page report not only indicated that the sex-change regime is built on weak and unreliable science but that if left unchecked, it has the potential to continue irreversibly damage minors, many of whom are, to begin with, likely incapable of properly consenting to sex-change medical interventions.
For daring to present the facts as they are contra what some may have hoped them to be, Cass has become a popular target for threats and smears by desperate gender ideologues and other leftist radicals.
The 66-year-old pediatrician recently
told the Times (U.K.) that the most recent wave of backlash “started the day before the report came out when an influencer put up a picture of a list of papers that were apparently rejected for not being randomised control trials.”
Among the fact-averse activists who seized upon the suggestion that the Cass report had failed to factor in various transgender narrative-affirming studies was Labor parliamentarian Dawn Butler. Butler told her fellow lawmakers in the House of Commons, “There are around 100 studies that have not been included in this Cass report and we need to know why.”
Cass called Butler’s assertion “completely wrong” and said it was “unforgivable” to undermine the report with such blatant falsehoods. The pediatrician told the Times that contrary to Butler’s suggestion, researchers had gone through all of the activist-preferred studies, but pulled results from only 60 as the remainder were of inferior quality.
Butler eventually had to eat crow, apologizing in the British parliament, indicating she made the mistake of quoting a Stonewall briefing.
Stonewall, of the U.K.’s most influential LGBT activist groups, has a knack for circulating false claims, having responded last month to NHS England’s decision to
end the prescription puberty blockers for children with the suggestion that luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone agonists, long used to chemically castrate sex offenders and known to deplete bone density, were “reversible.”
Stonewall has also parroted the claim that “children as young as 2 recognise their trans identity.”
“If you deliberately try to undermine a report that has looked at the evidence of children’s healthcare, then that’s unforgivable. You are putting children at risk by doing that,” added Cass.
Cass has apparently also been flooded with abusive emails, such that security services have reportedly had to intervene with advice.
“There are some pretty vile emails coming in at the moment. Most of which my team is protecting me from, so I’m not getting to see them,” she told the Times. Some of them contained “words I wouldn’t put in a newspaper.”
“What dismays me is just how childish the debate can become,” continued the pediatrician. “If I don’t agree with somebody then I’m called transphobic or a Terf [trans-exclusionary radical feminist].”
Apparently, the security services Cass has been dealing with figure some radicals may seek to do more than threaten the doctor online.
“I’m not going on public transport at the moment,” she told the Times, “following security advice, which is inconvenient.”
Cass drew the ire of radicals for noting in her report that:
- the “systematic review showed no clear evidence that social transition in
childhood has any positive or negative mental health outcomes, and
relatively weak evidence for any effect in adolescence”; - puberty blockers “exert their intended effect in suppressing puberty,” but compromise
bone density and have no apparent impact on “gender dysphoria or body
satisfaction”; - there is a dearth of consistent evidence about the “effect of puberty suppression on psychological or psychosocial
wellbeing, cognitive development, cardio-metabolic risk or fertility”; - there is a lack of high-quality research assessing the outcomes of hormone interventions in adolescents confused about their sex;
- there is no evidence to support the popular claim amongst gender ideologues that cross-sex hormones reduce the elevated risk of deaths amongst those suffering from gender dysphoria;
- clinicians are incapable of determining with certainty which prospective child victims might simply grow out of their confusion;
- for “most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress”; and
- the so-called science regarding “gender-affirming care” is “an area of remarkably weak evidence” built on “shaky foundations.”
Whereas Stonewall and leftists find the facts hard to digest, others have willingly admitted fault.
A group of 16 senior clinical psychologists penned a letter in the Guardian on April 21, noting, “Whether intentionally or not, and many were doing their best in an impossible situation, it was clinical psychologists who promoted an ideology that was almost impossible to challenge; who, as the Cass report found, largely failed to carry out proper assessments of troubled young people, and thus put many on an ‘irreversible medical pathway’ that in most cases was inappropriate; and who failed in their most basic duty to keep proper records.”
They concluded, “We are ashamed of the role psychology has played [in gender-affirming care].”
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